With SAP Design Studio 1.3 now in GA, I checked out all the new features available in the new version. As soon as you log in to Design Studio 1.3 to create a new application, you would notice a whole new set of pre-defined templates like “Adhoc Analysis”, “KPI Dashboard”, and “KPI Details” that can be used to create applications on-the-fly. I chose one such template and built a simple analysis application.
Following are my observations:
Mobile Compatibility – Design Studio 1.3 has some new templates and themes for iPad. In comparison to the previous version, the cross tab component works a lot better in the current version. Scrolling is a lot easier now but there are a few performance issues that are yet to be resolved.
Print – Print option is WYSIWYG based printing, but with a few drawbacks – The printed visualizations are a little compressed even if we set the orientation to landscape.
Bookmarks – You can save navigational states of an application using bookmarks. This can be done both in local and BI platform mode (and not in other modes). You can share your bookmarks with other users on the BI platform, and this is very useful. Most visualization tools like Qlikview and TIBCO Spotfire have been supporting bookmarks and it’s nice to see this now in SAP Design Studio.
Personalization – You can set the initial view using personalization options. The next time you run the app, the view that has been set/personalized would automatically load as the initial view. You can also delete it whenever you want. Following code is used to set personalization
State.setPersonalization();
Formatted Text – FormattedTextView is a new component used in scenarios where you want a mixed formatting. For eg; you can have normal text, combined with bulleted list. Also options like bold italic etc. are available. It’s a similar to the SAP UI5 component and can be used in scenarios where user needs to enter details like name,address etc or when we add bulleted lists to our application.
Conditional Formatting in Charts – You can now set conditional formatting for your charts. Set rules (like greater than, lesser than or equal to) and manipulate the series color of the chart. One drawback is that it doesn’t dynamically update the benchmark value – An implication is that values charted would be impacted by filters, but the benchmark would remain static, leading to inconsistent results.
New Chart Types – SAP Design Studio 1.3 has new chart types such as heat maps,tree maps and trellis. The rendering of Trellis chart could have been a little better (as in SAP Lumira).
Additional Properties in Charts – You don’t have to bank on CSS anymore to style your charts. You can set font type,size, color,weight etc. for axis labels and title using the chart additional properties window. There are also options to set padding for charts.
Universe – can now connect to Relational universes, single-source universes and universes with the following as underlying databases:
1. Microsoft SQL
2. Sybase IQ
3. Microsoft Excel
4. CSV
5. ERP system
6. Oracle DB
7. IBM DB2
8. Teradata
Passing parameters using url encode – We can encode strings to a URL now using URL encode. Hence a string like “North America” would give us North%20America. This helps in leveraging URL based interactions.
String Functions – Options to search for a particular text and return the index, sub string, length of the string etc. are now available. We can leverage this to include different functionalities in our application.
Add Items to Selectors – We can dynamically add items during run time to a list box or combo box. This is a great feature that can be used in combination with the bookmark feature where you can add bookmarks dynamically and load the saved bookmark.
HANA Deployment – Design Studio applications can now be deployed in the HANA platform. Applications can now load and retrieve data much faster when in comparison with BI platform and Netweaver platform. To know how to install design studio in HANA system click here .
Lumira integration is planned in future.
Overall, SAP Design Studio 1.3 is packed with a lot of new and interesting features, except for the frequent crashes I experienced (I tried in different environments). I’ll keep you posted as I explore further.
Republished from www.visualbi.com/blogs
- SAP Managed Tags:
6 Comments
